Friday, February 29, 2008

ROGERS SUGAR INCOME FUND is an open-ended, limited purpose trust established to hold all of the common shares and notes of Rogers Sugar Ltd. and Lantic Sugar Limited. Rogers and Lantic are refiners, processors, distributors and marketers of sugar products in Canada.

Friday, February 15, 2008

According to PowerShares Capital Management LLC The PowerShares FTSE™ RAFI US 1000 Portfolio (Fund) is based on the FTSE™ RAFI US 1000 Index. The Index is designed to track the performance of the largest U.S. equities, selected based on the following four fundamental measures of firm size: book value, cash flow, sales and dividends. The 1000 equities with the highest fundamental strength are weighted by their fundamental scores. The fundamentally weighted portfolio is rebalanced and reconstituted annually.

According to Dow Jones the Dow Jones Averages components are selected at the discretion of the editors of The Wall Street Journal. There are no pre-determined criteria except that components should be established U.S. companies that are leaders in their industries;

For the sake of continuity, composition changes are rare, and generally occur only after corporate acquisitions or other dramatic shifts in a components core business, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is not limited to traditionally defined industrial stocks. Instead, the index serves as a measure of the entire U.S. market, covering such diverse industries as financial services, technology, retail, entertainment and consumer goods.

Question - how come the "managed" PowerShares are under performing the "unmanaged" Dow Industrials? So much for Fundamental Indexing.

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Bellwether - the term is derived from the Middle English Bellewether - Refers to the practice of placing a bell around the neck of a castrated ram - (a wether) in order that this animal might lead its flock of sheep.

United Parcel Service is a bellwether for the U.S. economy

Note the negative divergence setup of last August - a warning of a pending corrective periodMonitor UPS here to rally from support to confirm the current advance

About Me

Bill has been writing a weekly business column in the Toronto Star since 1997, and was an early contributor to the former “Report on Business Television”. He has founded the Getting Technical Market Newsletter in December 1998.
Bill is also an Instructor for the Canadian Securities Institute. He is also a contributing author of the textbook for the technical analysis course offered by the Canadian Securities Institute (CSI. He is also called upon to provide training to industry professionals on technical analysis at many of Canada’s leading brokerage firms.
In February 2010 Bill became a technical sub-advisor to Stonebrooke Asset Management Ltd. who manages the Hybrid Investment Program under the Elite Wealth Strategies program for Union Securities Ltd..
The relationship ended in Feb 2012 but over the 24 month period the Hybrid Program enjoyed five technical selections that were the subject of takeover bids namely, Gerdau Ameristeel, El Paso Corp, Biovail Corp. Viterra Inc. and ShawCor Ltd